China’s Xi To Host Global South Summit With Putin And Modi

President Xi Jinping will gather more than 20 world leaders at a regional security forum in China next week in a powerful show of Global South solidarity in the age of Donald Trump while also helping sanctions-hit Russia pull off another diplomatic coup.

Aside from Russian President Vladimir Putin, leaders from Central Asia, the Middle East, South Asia, and Southeast Asia have been invited to the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit, to be held in the northern port city of Tianjin from Aug. 31 to Sept. 1.

The summit will feature Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s first visit to China in more than seven years as the two neighbors work on further defusing tensions roiled by deadly border clashes in 2020.

Modi last shared the same stage with Xi and Putin at last year’s BRICS summit in Kazan, Russia, even as Western leaders turned their backs on the Russian leader amid the war in Ukraine. Russian embassy officials in New Delhi last week said Moscow hopes trilateral talks with China and India will take place soon.

“Xi will want to use the summit as an opportunity to showcase what a post-American-led international order begins to look like and that all White House efforts since January to counter China, Iran, Russia, and now India have not had the intended effect,” said Eric Olander, editor-in-chief of The China-Global South Project, a research agency. “Just look at how much BRICS has rattled [U.S. President] Donald Trump, which is precisely what these groups are designed to do.”

This year’s summit will be the largest since the SCO was founded in 2001, a Chinese foreign ministry official said last week, calling the bloc an “important force in building a new type of international relations.”